Averages make good headlines...

Good for amusement purposes that is. Or good as in provoking a "who makes up these numbers?" reaction.

The fact that some companies may value their (potentially) lost or exposed data at several squillion arbitrary currency units will skew the average well above a level that's meaningful for *most* of the participants in the study.

And if it's anything like the surveys I fail to avoid, people will just have made up numbers to make the pollster[1] go away....

[1] I love the ones where they read a list of options at you without showing any underastanding of what any of the words mean...

Bootable USB is the way to go....

PING works nicely from a partitioned USB stick. You have the PING bootimage on a small partition (the ISO being transferred using UNetbootin). It will then happily save your backups on the remainder of the stick.

The advantage of this approach is that you can restore from a single device. And you can always copy your backups to other media for backup/storage...

Keyboardness

While the standard keyboard on the new iMacs is indeed the one without the numberpad, the normal Apple keyboard is available as an option from the Apple Store. And quite remarkably for Apple, they won't charge you extra for the extra keys.

@AC - That's not the question....

Much the best way

In-place upgrades are best avoided when moving to a new version of Windows. A clean install will generally result in a more stable system, and it's an ideal opportunity to get rid of the 3,187[1] applications you installed, used once then forgot about. And are you suggesting that people shouldn't be routinely backing up their data anyway?

Conversions? Who mentioned conversions?

What the office here has to do is look up the actual UK retail price. No maths required, and no dependency on fluctuating exchange rates, which would indeed be pointless. Especially as UK prices bear little relation to US ones in many cases.

@Sarah Bee

Having looked at the Playmobil article, I'd have to say the ODFO should be directed at the editorial policy of not being arsed to translate articles from your US office. It wouldn't be all that difficult to insert UK prices in brackets, would it?

UK translation required...

Tell me, is el Reg still a UK-based site? Is that .co.uk an illusion? Have you been secretly taken over by people from over the pond?

Or is there some less sinister reason for running a product review which mentions US pricing in those "dollar" things rather than the "pound" things Apple accept here? Whether the software is "worth $79" is not a relevant question to most UK readers, who will have to consider if it's worth £69.

Deducting VAT at 15% (important to do that, as US prices exclude sales taxes, and we need to make a fair comparison) takes it to £60, which at the current exchange rate seems to be about £86. Though this is subject to fluctuation. And once Apple realise they're not overcharging us by their usual margin, it'll probably go up....

Should I buy a couple of spares?

I like my little SSD AA1. I had a lot of fun playing with a few Linux distros before settling on Ubuntu NBR. The price at the time I bought was at a comfortable level for what was going to be mostly a toy - though it is great to take on short trips.

Something bigger (and presumably heavier and more expensive) wouldn't have done the trick at all. Maybe a bigger SSD and more RAM, but i don't need a full-size HDD, I don't need a bigger screen and I get quite enough of Windows at work, thanks...

But I suspect I'm in the geeky minority, and the mass market will want Windows. Mutter.

Hold on, you're saying people *click* on ads?

@Liam - he just looks young...

The Doctor has looked quite young before, but you'd have been very young at the time. And as a Time Lord, he can look as young as he likes. Some of us have got quite used to him being younger than we are, without ill effect...

Silly Tesla People

Surely they aren't mistaking a popular comedy show for a serious motoring review thingy?[1] Makes about as much sense as complaining that "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" only has about two music questions per series these days....

[1] If it was a serious motoring review thingy, I wouldn't have the slightest interest in watching it...

So he's changed sides?

Or was he really working with the Sheriff of Nottingham all through those 17 hideous weeks? I suppose it could have been a Baldrick-worthy Cunning Plan to make the general population hate Robin Hood. Certainly put me off....

Good URL, too

78.3% of statistics are made up on the spot

So you're saying that 40% of those surveyed are too dim to make up a fake password for a £5 voucher? These alleged surveys keep coming up and the same claims are made, without anyone (from the people doing the survey to the journalists who uncritically reproduce the results) apparently considering that 56.98% of people[1] will tell porkies to get free stuff.

Offer me money/vouchers/chocolate/booze and I'll happily give you lots of passwords. I can't promise that any of them will get you anywhere, but they will be passwords...

Of course, it's quite possible that 78.21%[2] of those handing over passwords were completely silly, and gave real ones, but there's no real way of telling, is there?

Nice kit

When this was first announced, I was interested. My interest waned a bit when I saw the currently excessive prices Waterstone's are asking for DRM eBooks.

My interest waxed again when I found more sources of reading material at more friendly prices (free is a nicely friendly price).

Then I played with one in my local Waterstone's. Well, it took me a few seconds to realise I *could* play. At first glance, I though the crisp, clear display was a mock-up. A quick fiddle convinced me that the UI is just about right.

If you haven't actually seen an eInk display, you need to have a look at one before dismissing it. It's nothing like an LCD...

So yeah, I bought one.

And Lee - there's no backlight, but there is an optional light accessory thingy.

@Tim Brown

There are some very silly people around

And it appears the Reg employs a few of them.

RTD did a spectacular job in bringing back Doctor Who. Unlike that tiny minority of very loud fans who like to whine[1], he knew that for the series to succeed, it had to be *popular television*, not just designed to appeal to hardcore fans.

The problem with those loud fans[2] is that they make a level of noise completely out of proportion to their numbers, which leads to journalists thinking that they represent a significant proportion of the population, which they don't.

A lot of these people (for an arbitrarily "12" value of "a lot") spent the time between the 1989 cancellation and the 2005 return reading a pile of Doctor Who books which took more adult and mature routes than the TV show ever did (or could, given its intended audience). So when the show came back and dared to be, well, *fun*, some of them got upset and whiny. And unlike the 80s, when whiners were confined to fanzines that nobody read, now they have the internet, and they get to expose many more people to their nonsense.

Steven Moffat is the best possible choice for a successor to RTD, but without RTD's work to date there wouldn't be a job for Steven to take.

And I give it half a series before the whiners start complaining about Steven Moffat.

[1] In the 1980s, John Nathan-Turner was the target of the same kind of tedious whining

Fine..

The only surprise...

...is that anyone is surprised.

CAPTCHAs are, not to put too fine a point on it, rubbish. They are a damn silly idea enthusiastically embraced by people who are either very naive or who like to make a show of "doing something" about spam.

Any CAPTCHA will, sooner or later, be cracked by some kind of bot, or by hordes of actual humans. And if you make them really hard for bots, you find more real people can't read the damn things. I have good eyesight with glasses, I use a nice big, clear screen and I keep running into CAPTCHAs that are hard to impossible to read.

As most spam seems to come from compromised PCs running their own little SMTP servers, applying CAPTCHAs to Hotmail and other such services isn't really going to make much difference, is it?

And "TranceMist" - how do you propose collecting that fee from a bot-infested PC? And who gets the money?

Solving the wrong problem

People need to develop a rare quality known as "patience". Rather than ringing every phone number you have for someone, try ringing one of them and leaving a message. Preferably a short but coherent one (I need help with 'x', or I need to talk to you about 'y'). Or send an email.

The problem in business today is that many people think that because we have near-instantaneous means of communication, they are entitled to near-instantaneous answers, which is both arrogant and silly.

Before everyone and his dog, cat and budgie had email, business communication worked like this:

Unified communications are just another way of making more people miserable. Constant interruptions and demands for instant responses throw away any notion of time management, or indeed getting work done.

[1] When people had secretaries to type for them and translate their grunts into English, nobody was exposed to the horrors of highly paid executives who apparently can't spell, use punctuation or indeed string a sentence together.[2]

[2] And by the Laws of the Internet, now I've said that, there will be an amusing typo somewhere in this comment

Gartner: says it all...

A long time ago, in a mailing list far away, we developed a theory about Gartner reports - simply put, any Gartner report will fall into one of two categories:

1) A statement of the mind-bogglingly obvious

2) A statement of the mind-bogglingly ludicrous

This would appear to be one of the latter. Some time ago, we (not the same "we" as the mailing list) noticed that web usage had increased during working hours, and that an overwhelming majority of that use was on one site: Facebook.

The management decison was to block access during working hours. Anyone sad enough to be around before 8:30 or after 5:30 is welcome to do whatever people do on Facebook. (Don't ask me, I looked at it for all of five minutes before deciding that it was of no interest to me at all...).

Facebook is just the current trend, which no doubt will go the same way as Fiends Reuntied (or whatever it was) and whatever was popular before that. Suggesting that it's of business value is, well, silly. Pretty much normal for the Gartner Grope, really...

Thomson Lyra

Another early player - used CF cards for content (I seem to recall a *huge* 32MB card). The fun bit was the parallel port card reader, which worked just fine under NT4, but didn't like Windows 2000 at first, which dates it to around 1999 or thereabouts.

It had a big enough display to tell you what was playing, wasn't all that big for the time, and worked moderately well.

Owww!!!

All so true...

I used to love PSP. Used to recommend it. Bought numerous copies at work for people who needed image editing. Great software at a good price. Now it has delusions of being Photoshop, takes longer than Adobe Reader to load and has too much stuff in it. Meanwhile, Adobe got sneaky, turned Photoshop Elements into something useful and cheap, and that's what I now recommend for people who don't really need actual Photoshop.

Oh, and .docx files? You'd bee surprised. I see several helldesk requests most weeks from people unable to open a file someone has sent them. We'll be giving everyone the converter...

Google Whats?

The main barrier for corporates adopting Office 2007 is that Office 2003 works, and doesn't require extensive and expensive[1] retraining of users. Well, that's the ones who get it "free" thanks to licensing arrangements. For others, it's a matter of cost - if there is no perceived benefit in an upgrade, why would a company pay for it?

Baaa!

I can read, actually...

If we're talking about "break times", that's actually a little difficult to enforce. It is possible with various web filtering products to set time limits and quotas for particular sites, but a little more difficult to detect when any given user is on an actual break. Looking at our web statistics, facebook is now the most visited site - significantly more than the business-related site that *used* to be on top.

We're considering much the same plan that Andy S mentions - it seems like a viable solution...

Oh dear....

Now normally, I'm all for the rights of the workers over the evil capitalist overlords, but this is just silly. Of course employees have a right to a life outside work, they just need to work on having that life outside of work rather than playing on facebook[1] all day.

[1] Obviously, techies playing on El Reg all day is *quite different*.[2]

[2] And just in case of anyone who enjoys missing points, please add your own virtual "joke alert" graphic to this comment.

This confirms my theory

The Conservative Party appears to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of New Labour plc. "Conservative" MPs are actually agents paid to come up with increasingly bonkers "ideas" which will ensure that under no circumstances will there be a change in government.